The European Data Protection Day is intended as a reminder that our personal data is part of our privacy and therefore enjoys particularly high protection.

In the EU, strict provisions apply to data protection, resulting from the definitions of privacy in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 12), the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 8) and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 7). The protection of personal data is explicitly highlighted in Article 8 of the Charter.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was added to this legal framework in May 2018. The GDPR is one of the most comprehensive and detailed regulations in the world, enabling citizens to claim their data protection rights as well as obliging private and public organizations to comply with these rights.

In the framework of the recently successfully completed EU Twinning project Institution-building for alignment with the Union acquis on the protection of personal data (Twinning) in Albania, in which the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights (LBI-GMR) participated as a junior project partner alongside the Consortium for Information Systems (CSI-Piemonte, Italy), a proposal for a new Albanian law on the protection of personal data, including implementing regulations, was drafted on the basis of the GDPR and is now undergoing political and public consultation.

Within the framework of the project the impact on other laws was also considered, such as laws with regard to video surveillance, public registers, or the application of a “Standard Data Protection Clause” in the context of transferring personal data to countries or institutions outside Albania whose data protection laws are less strict.

Through the good cooperation of the experts from the LBI-GMR and CSI-Piemonte with the team of the Albanian Commissioner for Information and Data Protection, an important contribution to the strengthening of human and civil rights in a candidate state of the EU thus could be achieved.